I am really looking forward to the most interesting security conference happening in the Nordic contries in recent years! The Honeynet Project is having their annual workshop right here in Stavanger!

Honeynet Project is is organising their Annual Honeynet Security Workshop this year from 18th to 20th May in Stavanger, Norway. The conference, expected to be attended by over 300+ participants from across the world, will be fully focused on various paradigms of IT Security and will be divided in to multiple focused tracks where technical track will cover latests security threats and solutions whereas CXO track will discuss and try to provide solutions for the challenges faced by the senior management.

The Honeynet Project is a nonprofit global organisation with a large global pool of people focused on Information/IT security and research. There are total of 44 honeynet chapters spread across the world. HP members consists of Entrepreneurs, representing various international universities to add a solid academic research angle, working in National security base organisations and private corporations like Microsoft, Facebook and other similar organisations.

The members meet once a year at a different locations to share their experience and to work towards convergence of security knowledge they possess. Previous workshops have been hosted in Warsaw, Dubai, Facebook HQ in San Francisco , Paris , UN’s Cyber Security Headquarters in Malaysia to name a few. In 2015 all this amazing group of people will be at Stavanger to share their knowledge.

The cloud services are all over the place. From files to your social life is beeing served through the cloud. And then you read about several information thefts from several of these companies and wonders, what would happen if my files were stolen? Would a break into my dropbox, google drive or others make it very easy to do an identify theft as well? What other things could follow? Dropbox is a great service, but to ease your worries, trucrypt comes to your rescue!

Trucrypt makes a virtual file system within an encrypted file (it can do a lot more as well!) You need to have a very good password, but then all the files are protected!

The only drawback is that if you have very large files, and you edit parts of it, you need to upload the complete file every time. Solution could be to divide it into several encrypted files (and if you have several encrypted files, which files should the bad guy try to brute force first….. but don’t use the same password in case)

Arstechnica has a great article about a man coming home and no telcos manages to deliver decent services. And then he knew about the MeshPotato and it did what it was designed for, bringing communications to those who has none. Read the full article at arstechnica.

OK, I was tired of the coffee machine at work. The coffee was no good.
And we were not allowed to buy another machine, since we already had two (of same kind, same terribly coffee)

What do you do?

You make the coffee machine as part of one of your projects. I’m working on smart houses, so that part was easy. The harder part was to find a cheap coffee machine with an Ethernet plug. I dismissed that quite fast and did it the hard (wired) way.

Part 1.

Get an automatic machine that does the most things (I did not find one with automatic cup dispenser)
I found a quite cheap one, approx 500 USD (3000 NOK). It had electronic buttons in the front which I presumed I could modify.

Part 2.

The harder part. Get to the circuit board to the buttons. Of course, these are compact machines and the circuit board are not made for being “serviced” easily. I had to unscrew approx 30 screws and dismantle most of it to get the right part out of it.

I soldered 4 wires, two for the button for single coffe and two for the double strength. The switch just needed a short-circuit to activate.

Then I connected the wires to a relay (capable of 230V, but I just use it as a switch). This was again connected to a smart controller from Sensio.

The rapper, whose real name is Jayceon Taylor, tweeted on his account Twitter.com/thegame that fans could call a given number and apply for an internship working for him, but the number given was the Compton area of Los Angeles‘ equivalent of the ‘999’ number and took callers straight through to the Sheriff’s department.

Also recalls an SMS that went around last time in 2007 in Norway, but also happened around year 2000.

I had two blade centres that I wanted to run virtualization on. Then it was timely that Ubuntu released their 11.04 version, cloud ready.

I read myself up on the Cloud controller, Cluster controller and the Node controller and started installing.

The first problem was when I did a PXE boot for the Node Controller. During the setup, the Node Controller contacts the Cluster Controller and the PXE server value is overwritten with the Cluster controller IP. The network configuration stopped further OS installation. I mounted the CD through the ILO management on the server instead, worked like a charm.

But the process of handling the images is not straight through. To setup a new image, you either need to do command line and remember IDs of the different images, or pay for the Landscape service.

I spent quite an amount of time to get the Ubuntu Cloud up and running, but dropped it and installed VMWare ESXi instead since I already used it for several years.